Posted:7th Sep 2009I'm on poi poi yes joined when we met their festival crew a few years ago.remember that mills is the same hand movements with any number of balls I found the higher under the arm throw was what took the most work, keeping it from going too far forwards or hitting the other balls, once that started evening out may pattern got better. it's not perfect yet still a little too 3D, rather than flat, but getting there.I found slightly higher throws gave me the time to sort my hands out because your hands need to be quicker than 3 balls, but not too fast. As Mike 7 said the RHYTHYM is more important really.

A couple of balls short of a full cascade... or maybe a few cards short of a deck... we'll see how this all fans out.

Posted:16th Sep 2009So a friend of mine came up with an interesting 3 ball trick:

One ball is thrown over the top (so outside throws a la Tennis), the second is thrown as a U-ball and the third stays in the middle but swaps hands. He also came up with a variation using claws to catch the U-ball which looks much nicer. I will get some footage as soon as I can (which may be a while).

'We're all mad here. I'm mad, you're mad." [said the Cat.]"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice."You must be," said the Cat, "Or you wouldn't have come here."- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures In Wonderland

Now... the one I've been having some trouble with.... 534.... WTF? I can 53445344 until the cows come home on either side (though it's a little sloppy on one side), but I can't seem to connect into 534. I even tried working on 5344453444 *sigh* Stupid pattern anyway... =P =)

Me and my friend have been discussing a pattern recently, it's a High Half-Shower going one way with a shower going the opposite direction underneath, with 4 balls. I beleive We worked it out to something like.... 4x,6x,4x,2x. He wanted to call it 3531, but that's a 3 ball pattern, so I just fudged the numbers a bit to make it work mathematically. Try it out!

Posted:7th Oct 2009I believe Gatto starts (or he used to, back in 1989) his 6 ball shower with 5 in one hand, 1 in the other, and throwing the one straight up to the same hand before going into the pattern. multiplexes do me fine on the 6 ball shower, never tried a 7 ball shower (which is just stupid)

Posted:27th Oct 2009So I've been thinking about putting together a routine of sorts. Not necessarily anything artistic or stage worthy, basically just some sequences of moves that I can nail 98.5% of the time - something to practice and feel good about accomplishing with minimal drops.

But I'm having a tough time limiting myself. Whenever I start a practice session with the intention of creating an achievable and repeatable sequence I end up going off on tangents and it becomes just like a normal practice session - always trying to stretch my limits instead of stringing together what I already know.

I think I'm going to try just writing down some mid-length sequences of moves and sticking to them letter for letter when I practice. Maybe I'll post some of them up when I get around to it.

Edit: Actually, I'll post up some of the stuff I did manage to get down on paper one session and maybe you guys can have a play around with it like fridge magnets or another metaphor for rearranging something.

Yeaaah, I couldn't really write up all the connections I made because I wrote some of them as weird little flow charts. Also, most of it is slightly too demanding to be running super comfortably (y'see I get carried away).

I also play a lot with 4 and 5 ball ground state siteswaps and some excited 4 ball swaps. That session I probably did a lot of 645, 744, 8444, 94444, 97531, 64, 77731 etc. and trying to chain some of them together. Similarly with 4 ball swaps.

As for three ball stuff I can't really do anything especially difficult or out of the ordinary so any three ball routine I put together would most likely look a bit bland, although I have been working a little bit on penguin catches and odd little stalls and behind-the-back passes and things so maybe I'll get creative and cook something up.

Posted:28th Oct 2009I threw something under club swinging, that I think could fit here, well, actually, it's not a move learnt yet, it's a move in the process of being processed... *shrug* 3-beat weave with clubs while juggling? I cannot figure it out, I just end up doing take outs or like reverse chops. Any ideas? Haven't seen a tutorial for it.